Mirrors and the language of the soul. Also a correction.

I’ve just finished pulling the remaining shards of mirror out of the big wooden frame that used to hang over the fireplace and a lugubrious task it is. There is something a bit sinister about the other side of a mirror.  It is so dead and grey, the absolute opposite of the lively life confirming reflective side.  Add to that the nasty sharp points, and a broken mirror is one of the ugliest things around.  No wonder its supposed to herald seven years of bad luck (but I’m not going to dwell on that). It reminds me too of the Snow Queen’s mirror that shattered and how a splinter of it lodged in little Kay’s heart and made him forget Gerda, to say nothing of the trouble making mirror that ratted on Snow White so she had to hole up with the seven dwarves or have her lungs and liver delivered to the wicked queen, when her majesty was told by the mirror that she was no longer the fairest of them all.

Anyway it’s done now and perhaps I’ll make a nice wall hanging to go above the fireplace instead.

It is sunny and the Sydney air seems so pure  after Shanghai. I delight in taking deep breaths when my meditation tape tells me to, and I realise that the disturbance I feel after the Chinese experience is fright.   I have a huge respect for all that China has done to house and support its massive population but is a necessary prerequisite of doing that having horrible air?  Is some complicated outcome of our own messy ways going to rebound on us sooner or later? 

My other sobering realisation is that there are ways of thinking so different from those shaped by western words (a dark day, a light hearted remark etc).  Chinglish, as it is patronisingly called, is well known for its comical rendering of English but perhaps instead of deprecating it we would be richer if we read it for the insights it gives into the Chinese vision of things.  I still love the Shanghai Starbucks English advertisement  “Every shot with precision and passion”.  No native speaker could ever have come up with that, and yet how exciting it makes a cup of coffee.  

I have one addition and one correction to make to a previous blog.  On our penultimate day in China, Finn took us to a truly delightful place about forty minutes away from Jaiding where we were staying.  It was a water town built around canals which are all over the place because China needs them just as much as the Netherlands did for draining the swamps.  It was called Zhujiajiao and was bustling with Chinese tourists taking boat rides and shopping for everything under the sun in the little shops that lined the banks of the canals.  The glutinous orange pork portions and baskets of cooked egg yolks belong here and not to the old town of Linhai as I said in a previous blog.  This place was certainly not like a theme park that hadn’t opened yet.  It was enormous fun and Grant bought a little flute and I bought some floppy black trousers which Fredi says makes me look like a hippy’

It was such a nice day.

Tonight I am going to dip my toes into a modest choir experience in Glebe. Only about twenty people instead of 200 plus as is the Philharmonia Chorus which I found a bit intimidating.  But it’s lovely to sing and apparently they do Palestrina whom I remember from my boarding schooldays.  Hope I can still manage such things.  Bye for now.